I've bought one of these. The EmperorLinux guys installed Fedora Core 2 on it. I love it! Works perfectly. I'm using the EmperorLinux 2.6.7 kernel, GNOME desktop. I get about 260fps from glxgears, and 3D games work fine.

If you buy a Meteor, David Cafaro did a great writeup on getting Fedora Core 2 working swimmingly.

About the slowness of installing OpenOffice.org, I bet this is really due to hard disk speed more that CPU.